Insect compound eyes and antennae
It's the middle of summer and you're sat outside at your BBQ with a cold can of cider loving life right now ... until you take your next drink and get stung on your tongue by THAT BLOODY WASP THAT WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE. Ok, so that hasn't happened to me, but it could...

Found on every continent, and even under the ocean, insects are everywhere around us whether we like it or not. It is estimated there are up to 10 million species of insect alive today on planet Earth.

Insects are part of the Arthropod phylum, and as such have an external skeleton and jointed limbs. All insects have six legs, and are the only type of invertebrate which has evolved the ability to fly.

Today's guest is Dr. Francis Gilbert is particularly interested in the evolution of life histories and mimicry in insects. We will be talking about mimicry in insects, insect-plant relations and conservation.

Tune in to find out more!

Natural Selection

This is competition between those within a species rather than competition between species. This is one reason trees grow so large, the taller ones gather the most light and convert the most energy and are the strongest, this leads to them surviving longest.

Mimicry

Today our guest is Meghan Gray and we're talking about Gravitational Lensing and Dark Matter. The universe is a pretty large place. Astronomers believe that the observable universe is a sphere, which measures 92 billion light years across. A light year is the distance light can travel in a year, which is roughly 6 trillion miles.

It is gravity, which governs the structure of the universe. Stars form into groups which orbit around a large mass in the middle – a bit like our atom. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter.

Believed to be within all galaxies is a halo of a substance known as dark matter. This substance is incredibly dense and accounts for 80% of the matter in a galaxy.

Gravitational Lensing However we have no idea where it came from or indeed what it looks like, as it doesn’t interact in ways like normal matter does, however we can passively detect dark from the effects it has on light and especially gravity.

A gravitational lens refers to a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant source (a background galaxy) and an observer, that is capable of bending or lensing the light from the source, as it travels towards the observer.

Hi! I'm the blog, you may recall me from such shows as Galaxy Zoo with Boris Haeussler. Well today we shall be talking to Steven Bamford about the Zooniverse!

The Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. Galaxy Zoo is just one of them. They also have projects like Old Weather, Planet Hunters and more...

The Alphabet in Galaxies

Stay tuned!

Although Galaxy Zoo and The Zooniverse seems like a outreach project, it's important to realise it's not just about selling science to the public. It's to get the science done that would otherwise take years to complete.

All 10 projects The Zooniverse has currently rely on humans and their brains to complete. There is a problem that computers cannot always distinguish the patterns the brain can, but one person cannot work as quickly as a computer does. This is the reason why their projects work.

Current Zooniverse Projects

Currently some of the active projects are Old Weather. Ancient Lives and Whale FM.

Current Zooniverse Projects

black hole

Tomorrow's Science Show is all about those science myths flying around that need a good debunking. We'll be covering topics such as:

- Will the Large Hadron Collider create a black hole which will consume the Earth?
- Can you see the Great Wall of China from space?
- Do black holes suck things in?

We'll also be chatting about the animal kingdom and finding out whether lemmings really do throw themselves off cliffs and whether bulls genuinely do 'see red' when they... umm... see red.

We'll also be taking your questions throughout the show, so make sure you listen live...

Citation Needed!

Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?

Essentially no, it's far too small! You're actually more likely to see a motorway as it is wider. The problem with the Great Wall of China is that its colour is pretty similar to its surroundings. You can actually see the largest building in the world, the Pentagon though,

If you look out over the world from space, you can actually distinguish cities and countryside due to the different colours.

Do lemmings commit mass suicide?

Sir Peter Mansfield

This week we're back to normal! George managed to book a guest and we'll be talking to Matt Brookes about imaging the brain, both with MRI and MEG.

Unless you've had your fingers in your ears while you've been here in Nottingham you've probably heard about MRI and Sir Peter Mansfield. You might even have undergone a scan! Back in the 1970's he came up with a way to image slices through a subject instead of the object as a whole as previously.

In 2003 Sir Peter Mansfield along with Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Click the picture on the right for more detailed information about the Nobel Prize.